On Managing Email - Bit Literacy Tips

Bit Literacy - Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload is a book written by Mark Hurst. It covers many different tips to help improve your productivity in today’s age of information overload.

We reviewed Mark’s complete book earlier this week.  Let’s continue today with some advice that you will probably only consider in dire circumstances.

I do find this inspiring. A little scary. But still inspiring.

Here is one more simple way to improve your productivity.

Beyond Email Overload

One of the things Mark presents in his book is a very effective style of handling email overload.

His first step may be the hardest.

• Delete all the mail in you inbox.

Drastic as this may seem, if you follow this process through you will no longer be bogged down by an inbox with hundreds or thousands of emails in your inbox. These hundreds of mails just show how much work we have, or appear to have.

Mark says you should do this daily and keep your inbox in a steady-state of emptiness.

In his own company he says he actually uses this process as a set of rules.

The first rule is “read personal mail first”. You might find this hard to accept. Mark believes that telling your employees that their family is low priority to all other email, including the interoffice memo, is simply bad for the morale.

Here is a brief outline of his email management system:

1. Read personal mail first
2. Delete all spam
3. Engage FYIs and action items, then delete

• Delete FYI after reading
• Any action that can be done in under 2 minutes, do it
• Any action that takes more than 2 minutes gets assigned to the todo list

Delete every email from your inbox as soon as you do it or as soon as you move it to your todo list. The todo list becomes your actionable item list, your inbox is empty and some emails have been filed where appropriate.

Newsletters And Bulk Mailing

These are read as much as needed, then deleted. If you have 2 consecutive newsletters, delete them both. If you have not read the old one yet, you probably never will.

FYI Email

These are emails that only give you information and do not require you to take real action. These are the true informational emails. Some need filing, some require a note on your calendar and maybe some other administrative action. Do the required action and delete the mail from your inbox.

To Do’s

Use the 2 minute rule. If you can do it in two minutes, get up and do it. If you need more than two minutes to complete the action assign it to your to do list. Once you have done the action or moved the action to your to do list, delete the mail.

How To Get Rid Of All Your Old Mail

Since an inbox will not be empty when you read this, Mark has also supplied a way to clear out your old mail.

• Sort by subject and look for newsletters with several issues. Delete them. If you have not read them you won’t. If you need to file them for posterity, then file them and delete them from your inbox. File delete.
• Find FYI and CC mails by sorting your mail by subject. Delete the ones that you know you can. File delete.

Next sort by date with oldest message on top.

• If the message is FYI, scan, file, delete.
• If the message requires action follow the 2 minute rule then file, delete.
• The bigger action items are easy to deal with, they go to the todo list and then file and delete.

This is not a halfway solution. Do this once, even if it takes a full day, until your inbox is empty. After the fist cleaning you will decide if you do mail twice a day or leave it open all the time. No matter what how often you decide to check your emails, when you close your inbox it has to be empty.

• File, scan, action, delete.

Once you are done with this process you will be able to spend more time actually working on other projects. You will have more time for your real job… or for your hobbies.

Tomorrow is the last day I’ll look at Bit Literacy…and it’ll be about To Do Lists.

Here are a few more Uniquely Cindy Sunday Book Reviews:
- Website Optimization by Andrew B. King
- How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders By Catherine Seda
- Mastering Online Marketing By Mitch Meyerson
- How The Internet Works By Preston Gralla
- Dotcomology The Science Of Making Money Online By Stone Evans
- The Ultimate Web Marketing Strategy By Ed Rivis
- The Culturally Customized Web Site By Nitish Singh And Arun Pereira
- Letting Go Of The Words - Writing Web Content That Works By Janice Redish
- Landing Page Optimization By Tim Ash

Here is another Uniquely Cindy article on Productivity:
- Mind Mapping Makes Life Easier